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Bn GEORGE F. HOAR. 



WORCESTER : 

Printed '&\ Tyler & Seagrave. 
1879. 




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AN 



ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



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JULY 2, 1879. 



By GEORGE FrHOAR. 



WORCESTER: 

Printed by Tyler & Seagrave. 

1879. 



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ADDRESS. 



I AM afraid that In accepting your invitation I 
have consulted my own pleasure rather than yours. 
I do not think you can know how unspeakably grate- 
ful to a man jaded with the care and work of public 
life, are expressions of good will that come to him 
from a company of scholars. You can hardly con- 
ceive how delightful the opportunity to change the 
scene by a visit to a famous college on the days of 
its high festival. It is like being a guest in some 
stately baronial hall, rich with association and tradi- 
tion, from which have issued forth, and shall again, 
in each generation, brave knights, wise statesmen, 
illustrious scholars ; whose walls are hung with por- 
traits of famous wits to whom it has been native or 
hospitable ; its cabinets rich with the contributions 
of science ; its libraries stored with rare manuscripts 
and priceless editions; with Its stories of royal visits, 
and its chambers where illustrious children were 
born, or illustrious guests have slept. 

It is touching and pleasant to see how the men 
who have won the great honors and prizes of the 
most civilized nations, have valued the good-will of 



their colleges. Canning, in one of his most famous 
speeches near the end of his brilHant career, claim- 
ed the sympathy of the House of Commons on ac- 
count of the sacrifice he had made to his conscien- 
tious conviction in favor of Catholic emancipation. 
Said he : — 

" From the earliest dawn of my public life — aye, from the first 
vision of youthful ambition — that ambition has been directed to one 
object above all others. Before that object all others vanished into 
comparative insignificance ; it was desirable to me beyond all the 
blandishments of power, beyond all the rewards and favors of the 
crown. That object was to represent the university in which I was 
educated. I had a fair chance of accomplishing this object when the 
Catholic question crossed my way. I was warned — fairly and kind- 
ly warned — that my adoption of that cause would blast my prospect. 
I adhered to the Catholic cause and blasted all my long-cherished 
hopes and expectations. Never to this hour have I stated, either in 
public or private, the extent of this irretrievable sacrifice ; but I have 
felt it no: ttie less deeplv. It is past and I shall speak of it no 
more." 

There are men from whom the great intellect, the 
public service, the marvellous eloquence of Webster, 
cannot extort forgiveness for the political errors of 
his later life. But it is hard to find a lover of a New 
Enofland college who does not surrender at discre- 
tion when he reads the two stories, — the one related 
by Mr. Webster in his autobiography, of the occa- 
sion when his father first intimated his intention of 
sending him to college : "I remember that I was 
quite overcome and my head grew dizzy. The thing 
appeared to me so high, and the expense and sacri- 
fice it was to cost my father so great, I could only 
press his hand and shed tears ;" — the other, of that 



scene in the room of the Supreme Court of the 
United States, where, as he concluded the argument 
that made safe the endowment of every college in 
America, the few broken words of tenderness for 
his Alma Mater, bursting fromi the heart of the strong 
man, melted bench and bar and audience to tears. 

Visiting Oxford eleven years ago, I made the ac- 
quaintance of Mr. Cox, the accomplished librarian 
of the Bodleian. He had found, a few days before, in 
some crypt, where it had lain for two hundred years, 
a letter written by Lord Clarendon just after he had 
landed at Calais, a hopeless exile, on his last flight 
from the country to which he was never again to 
return. I have procured a^ copy, which you may 
like to hear. The great orator, statesman, histo- 
rian, lawyer, judge, — counselor, companion and an- 
cestor of monarchs, — flying for his life, in his o'.d 
age, into a foreign land, from the court, of which, for 
a generation, he had been the ornament and head, 
soon as his feet touch a place of safety, thinks of 
his university. See the noble heart through the 
simple and stately rhetoric : — 

" Good Mr. Vice-Chancellor : — 

Having found it necessarv to transport mvselfe out of England, 
and not knowing when it will please God that I shall returne againe, 
it becomes me to take care that the university may not be without 
the service of a person better able to be of use to them than I am 
like to be, and I doe therefore hereby surrender the office of Chan- 
cellor into the hands of the said university, to the end that they may 
make choyce of some other person better qualified to assist and 
protect them, than I am. I am sure he can never be more affec- 
tionate to it. I desire you as the last suite I am likely to make to 
you, to believe that I doe not fly my country for guilt, and how pas- 



sionately soever I am pursued, that I have not done anything to 

make the university ashamed of me, or to repent the good opinion 

they had once of me, and though I must have no further mention in 

your publique devotions, (which I have always exceedingly valued,) 

I hope I shall be always remembered in your private prayers, as 

Good Mr. Vice-chancellor. 

Your affectionate servant. 

Clarendon. 
Calais, this 7-17 Dec, 1667. 

As compared with the universities of the old 
world, or even with some of our own, Amherst is 
but a young college. But she already is in the fore- 
most rank. She has made her ample contribution 
to science, to literature, to professional and public 
life. Into whatever paths your feet may go, you 
can cherish no manlier sentiment than to love 

" This glorious lady with the eyes of light. 
And laurels clustering round her lofty brow ;" 

— like Canning, to deem her approbation the high- 
est honor and prize of life ; — like Webster, to bring 
your best powers, if need be, to her service and de- 
fence ; — like Clarendon, in misfortune and sorrow, 
to find comfort in the thought that you have done 
nothing to make her ashamed of you. 

It is certainly a hopeful sign, or rather an emphat- 
ic proof of the great regard in which a college 
training is held, that we celebrate with so much in- 
terest the days on which classes of young scholars 
take their place in the life of the country. Every 
new state, as it comes into the great family, hastens 
to establish its university. Men who have enjoyed, 
men who have been denied these advantao-es in 



their own youth, vie with each other in liberal ben- 
efaction. The voluntary gifts made by private citi- 
zens to universities and colleges, estimating only 
those large enough to be mentioned in the newspa- 
pers, and only those which came in that way to the 
notice of the bureau of education, amounted in 
1872 to more than $8,000,000, and in 1873, the last 
year before the great depression of business, to 
$11,226,977. The number of young men who re- 
ceive the degrees of our colleges, not including the 
professional schools, is a little more than thirty 
six hundred annually. 

I am therefore brought naturally and almost inev- 
itably to this topic — The place of the College 
Graduate in American Life. 

I might well hesitate, coming from other studies, 
to deal with a subject which has been the theme of 
so many abler speakers, and which must have filled 
so large a space in the instructions of this place. 
What I have to say is simple and fragmentary. But 
upon a matter so vital, every suggestion may have 
its value. It will be something, even to make com- 
monplaces more commonplace ; something, out of 
the experience of life, to add the testimony of a man 
of the world to the axioms, the truisms, which you 
have heard from the college pulpit or the professor's 
chair. 

The longer I live, and the more carefully I study 
the influences which affect the political action or 
determine the history of this people, the more I am 
impressed with the need of the constant reiteration 



of a few very old and very simple truths. Every 
child that is born needs to learn for himself to walk, 
and to talk, and to understand the meanino; of com- 
mon words. Every new citizen, whether he grow 
into this freedom from infancy, or come from abroad, 
or come out of slavery, is to learn for himself the 
simple duties of citizenship. The teacher of the 
people, and the teacher of the teachers of the peo- 
ple, have first and chiefest of all to teach these plain 
lessons. 

All our constitutions are based upon the theory 
that the people are to be educated. The influence 
of the college graduate in the republic may there- 
fore be said to be -after all, differing in degree only, 
so far as this theory is carried out, — the influence 
of the citizen in the republic. But he ought at 
least to be the best educated man in the republic. 
His active life begins with attainments which come 
to others, if they come at all, painfully and late. 
Even when others tread the same paths, it is expect- 
of him — 

I understand the training of the college graduate 
to differ from that of other citizens in this : In the 
common school, and the technical or professional 
school, the principal purpose is to acquire knowledge 
— something that the pupil is to know and use ; — 
moral and intellectual training is but an incident. 
The college makes discipline its principal end, and 
the mere acquisition of knowledge is secondary. A 
trained intellect, a cultivated taste, a quickened and 



elevated sense of honor and moral and religious 
responsibility — these are the results at which it aims. 
I do not mean to be understood that the capacity 
for discerning truth can be developed, without, in 
the process, acquiring useful truths, or that the taste 
for what is beautiful in literature, or art, or conduct, 
is likely to be highly cultivated without gaining the 
valuable gift of creating or describing such things, 
which is the function of the orator, or the artist, or 
the poet. But it is strength, and not weapons, that 
the college chiefly undertakes to supply. The head 
of our neighboring university, whose wide range of 
elective studies has been viewed with some appre- 
hension, still recognizes and admits this truth when 
he well says : " The worthy fruit of academic cul- 
ture is an open mind, trained to careful thinking, 
instructed in the methods of philosophic Investiga- 
tion, acquainted in a general way with the accumu- 
lated thoughts of past generations, and penetrated 
with humility." But all this is matter of defini- 
tion, more or less exact. We know what a college 
is, and what a college graduate should be. The 
possessor of a college degree is entitled everywhere 
to write after his name — generosus — gentleman. He 
is, as a rule, to belong to a learned profession. He 
expects to win his bread, and to make his way in 
life by some occupation which is to be the work of 
his brain, and not by manual labor. 

For a thousand years the country gentleman has 
been the backbone of England. In every neighbor- 
hood, the lord of the manor has dwelt in his ances- 



lO 

tral hal], and under his stately trees, which have 
descended in his name from eldest son to eldest 
son. As in all cases of inherited dignities, what 
are the personal qualities of the individual depends 
upon accident. Sometimes he has been brought up 
as the companion of grooms and gamekeepers. 
Sometimes he has been the best scholar at the great 
school or the university. Sometimes he is a Squire 
Western, half ruffian and half boor ; sometimes mod- 
est, wise, brave, affectionate, like John Hampden or 
John Winthrop. But neither he nor his neighbors 
forget that he is a member of a proud and powerful 
aristocracy. He is never without the sense that, — 

" In his halls is hung 
Armory of the invincible knights of old," 

or without the desire that his descendants shall 
maintain his place when he is gone, and that the 
England, the invincible England, of which he and 
his fathers have been the type, shall endure. The 
author of " The Great Governing Families of Eng- 
land " says : — 

'* Seymours or Percies, Russells or Herberts, expect to be great 
next century as now, plan for the next century as well as this, reck- 
on immediate advantage light when compared with the great objects, 
the permanent grandeur and power which they desire England to 
hold, because with the greatness of England, their own is indissolu- 
bly bound up. It is the element of resistance, the breeze in the 
brick, the hair in the mortar, the fibre in the wood, the bone in the 
body, which they contribute to our social fabric, the quality ot per- 
manence which they add to our institutions " 

He has had in old times many a struggle with king 
and clergy, and in late years his conservative opin- 



1 1 



ions have two or three times had to yield to the 
manufacturing and trading classes. But the power 
comes back to his hands. The strifes of English 
politics are still but contests for his favor. He has 
for a thousand years held his own in England, and 
under his lead, with the qualities and temper he has 
impressed on her, England has held her own, and a 
great deal that is not her own, in the deadliest fields 
of battle. Napoleon said on the night after Water- 
loo, ''Ca a toiijours fini de meme depuis Crery^ " It 
has always turned out the same way since Cressy." 

Now, my young friend, compare the place to 
which the English gentleman comes but by the ac- 
cident of birth, with that which you may take, sim- 
ply at the price of deserving it, in our mighty nation- 
al life. You may win this place which the English 
gentleman inherits. Your manor shall be large in 
exact proportion to your own personal size. You 
do not need inherited acres, dependent tenantry, or 
a people bred for fifty generations to the worship of 
rank. These would be to you nothing but weights. 
Instead of these things the college enables you to 
begin life with the qualities which I have described. 
You have a scholar's capacity for the discernment of 
truth from falsehood, a scholar's power to make this 
clear to other men, a scholar's refined taste manifest- 
ing itself in conduct and character which so attracts 
and wins your neighbors to you that they are inclin- 
ed to accept what you esteem and love, because you 
esteem and love it. Above all, every man within 
your influence knows you for a man of absolute in- 



12 

tegrity. It was well said b}^ an early American 
author, now too much neglected, that: — 

" There is no virtue without a characteristic beautv. To do what 
is right argues superior taste as well as mo-als ; and those whose 
practice is evil, feel an inferioritv of intellectual power and enjoy- 
ment, even where they take no concern for a principle. Doing well 
has something more in it than the mere fulfilling of a duty. It is a 
cause of a just sense ot elevation of character ; it clears and strength- 
ens the spirits ; it gives higher reaches of thought. The world is 
sensible of these truths, let it act as it mav. It is not because of his 
integrity alone that it relies on an honest man ; but it has more con- 
fidence in his judgment and wise conduct, in the long run, than in 
the schemes of those of greater intellect, who go at large without 
any landmarks of principle. So that virtue seems of a double nature, 
and to stand oftentimes in the place of whac we call talent." 

The safest property in this country is the knowl- 
edge of a profession. It is said that of those per- 
sons who engage in trade, nearly ninety-five per 
cent fail in the course of their lives, btocks and 
bonds shrink in value and become worthless. Lands 
and houses may be weighed down by the bur- 
den of taxes. The fire may consume, or the thief 
■break in and steal, the most carefully guarded wealth. 
But the capacity for a learned profession, once be- 
stowed in that burglar-proof, fire-proof, portable safe, 
your brain, is secure against every chance which 
does not destroy life or health. John Quincy Adams 
advises his son not to engage in political life until 
he has a secured independence. What indepen- 
dence so secure as the mastery of one of the profes- 
sions which must ever be a necessity to civilized 
man. Wherever men live together in society, how- 
ever rude, however refined, the need of humanity 



13 

will demand the clergyman, the advocate, and the 
physician. 

I am not undertaking to set forth the dignity of 
either profession, what are the qualifications for it, 
or the kind of education it demands. I am only 
pointing out the natural influence its members may 
exert ever the intellect and conscience of the peo- 
ple. The man whose function is to expound the 
law of duty, the hope of immortality, the relation 
of human beings to their Creator; the man whose 
function is to interpret human law and human jus- 
tice in their authority over property and liberty and 
life ; the man who knows and applies the science of 
which the human body is the domain, and the preser- 
vation of life and health the end ; — these men would 
seem to command the approaches to the ear and 
favor of the people. This power is wholly moral. 
The submission to it is wholly voluntary. It is 
honorable alike to him who wields it and to him 
who obeys it. It consists only in the capacity to 
influence other men by appeals to reason and con- 
science, and by the force of an upright example. 

Behold then our college graduate thus equipped, 
with trained intellectual powers, cultivated taste, 
character commanding the respect of men ; in the 
words of Burke, " Educated in science, in erudition, 
in taste, in honor, in generosity, in humanity, in ev- 
ery liberal sentiment and every liberal accomplish- 
ment," — his profession an endowment of compe- 
tence and independence ; stimulated by great tradi- 
tions, great opportunities, and great hopes ; plant- 



ed at the approaches which command the favor of 
the people. What shall this man do for the State ? 
Surely he cannot mean to disdain the leadership 
which is ready to his hand. Surely he will not con- 
teat himself with getting a living, or aim only at the 
eratification of ambitions which are personal and 
selfish. He will be conspicuous for a generous 
public spirit. He is an ever-burning lamp. His 
biography will be wTitten in the institutions of the 
community that surrounds him. Here a library 
will owe its foundation to his efforts. There gene- 
rations of children will reap the benefit of his labors 
for a school. Some political tempest of passion and 
folly has passed over the land. Some human Luci- 
fer- — or rather some bringer of darkness and not 
light — has banded together all that is evil in the 
state in the service of an unhallowed ambition. 
There is a spot which the scourge does not seem 
to have visited. It is the town where this man 
lives, — or the neighborhood where men have looked 
to him as a guide : — 

" His strength is as the strength of ten. 
Because his heart is pure." 

There are few things more noticeable about this 
vast machine of ours which we call our country 
than its sensitiveness to the individual touch. How 
many men can you reckon whose education has 
been exactly your education, whose opportunity was 
exactly your opportunity, who have begun as you 
begin, whose brave and devoted lives have affected 
sensibly and permanently the well being of the 
whole country. 



15 

" The true marshaling of the degrees of sovereign 
honor," says Lord Bacon, " are these. In the first 
place are conditores imperioriim, founders of states 
and commonwealths, such as were Romulus, Cyrus, 
Caesar, Ottoman, Ismael." It is, and will be for 
generations to come, the peculiar good fortune of 
this country, that while it has so many of the advan- 
tages of an old civilization, this process of founding 
new communities is perpetually going on. They 
are springing into life without number, even in the 
oldest states. The successful manufacturer builds 
his new villao-e. The inventor of a new mechanism, 
of a platform scale, or a machine for wicker work, 
creates a town. At the bidding of the genius of 
manufacture, cities grow like the palace of Aladdin. 
Each of these has its own separate life, I had almost 
said, its own separate immortality. I do not wish 
to seem to exaggerate, but I can scarcely overstate 
either the extent or the permanence of the influence 
on one of these plastic and impressible societies of 
a single honest and manly life. What is going on 
in our own neighborhood takes place on a gigantic 
and imperial scale in the vast spaces of the West. 
The region drained by the Mississippi and its navi- 
o:able affluents, extendinsf to New Mexico on the 
southwest and Colorado on the west, and so on to 
the northwest where Lewis and Clark's pass in Ida- 
ho opens a gateway in the Rocky mountains, a dis- 
tance of thirteen hundred miles from northeast to 
southwest, and more than sixteen hundred from 
southeast to northwest, making nearly two million 



i6 

square miles of territory, and nine thousand miles 
of navigable waters, is occupied by states still in 
their infancy, or by vacant spaces which still wait 
the habitation of man. Passing the Rocky moun- 
tains, you enter the region scarcely inhabited, scarce- 
ly explored, consisting of western Idaho and Wash- 
ington territories, extending six hundred miles from 
east to west, and three hundred from north to south, 
— one hundred and eighty thousand square miles. 
This territory lies on the future pathway of com- 
merce from Europe and the Atlantic to China and 
Japan. Southward of this is the region now divid- 
ed by Arizona, Utah, southern Idaho and the young 
states of California, Oregon, Nevada and Colorado, 
making more than seven hundred thousand square 
miles, rich with mineral wealth, and capable of feed- 
ing and clothing the entire population of Europe. 
The present crop of wheat raised in this country 
may be multiplied fifty fold. Not more than three 
per cent of our cotton land has ever been under 
cultivation. We have within our limits, a greater 
stock of coal than all other countries combined. 
" We have," says Dr. Elder, " a sea-coast so deeply 
indented, and a lake and river system dissecting the 
mass so thoroughly, that a domain only one-sixth 
less than the area of the fifty-nine or sixty em- 
pires, states, and republics of Europe, and of equal 
extent with the Roman empire at its largest, is cut 
for the purpose of internal and external commerce, 
into twenty islands of the size of Great Britain." 
This territory, so adapted in situation, in climate. 



17 

and in resources, for the abode of the great, pow- 
ful, and free people for which it waits, is not with- 
out its appropriate ornaments. Rivers that are 
lakes, lakes that are seas, cataracts like Niagara, or 
Trenton, or the great falls of the Yellowstone, or the 
cascades which lend a more than Alpine beauty to 
the mountains to which they give their name, vast 
mountain ranges which lift their imperial foreheads 
to the sun, (Prof. Eliot states that in one chain near 
the Yellowstone, he counts more than a hundred 
peaks that are above eleven thousand feet in hight, 
and eight or ten that will reach twelve or thirteen 
thousand), forests that began their mighty growth 
ages before the cedars of Lebanon were in the seed, 
ravines like Yosemite, — all these God revealed 
when he 

" Uncovered the land 
That he hid of old time in the West, 
As the sculptor uncovers the statue. 
When he has wrought his best." 

If Lord Bacon award his foremost place in the de- 
grees of sovereign honor to such founders as were 
Romulus, Cyrus, Caesar, Ottoman, Ismael — if he who 
brings a new state into life, even as an asylum for a 
clan of banditti, or a restless nomadic tribe, or builds 
an empire on the ruins of his country's liberties, shall 
have any honorable rank — what place shall be his 
who helps to lay in Christian liberty and law, the 
foundations of an American state ? His work, we 
fondly hope, will be permanent as it is honorable. 

What a promise of perpetual life'in this marvelous 
organism of state and nation. Every new state 



brings to the entire national life of which it is a 
part, the fresh and healthful blood of youth. Eng- 
lishmen like to compare England to an oak, which 
strikes its roots deep into the ground, and spreads 
its branches far into the air, and stands for century 
after century as a shelter for those who gather be- 
neath its shade. But the oak has but a single life, 
limited bv the inexorable law of orowlh and of de- 
cay. A single lightning stroke may shatter its 
trunk, or a single hurricane tear up its roots. But 
America may find her type in that wonderful Asiatic 
tree whose boughs as they extend fror.^ the parent 
trunk, bend over till they touch the earth and strike 
new root, getting fresher sap and lustier life for the 
original tree with each added stem, till a whole 
forest with a thousand trunks grows up, blended in 
a single but complex organism : — 

" Branching so broad and long, that in the ground 
The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow 
About the mother tree, a pillared shade 
High over arched, and echoing wal]!^ between." 

So every new state, first planted from the great 
parent national trunk, strikes down into the soil. 
The tree our fathers set covered at first but a little 
space by the sea-side. It has planted its banyan 
branches in the ground, it has spread along lake 
and gulf, over mountain and river, and prairie and 
plain, till its hardy growth shelters the frozen regions 
of the far northwest, and its boughs hang over the 
Pacific, and in good time it will send its roots be- 
neath the waves, and receive under its vast canopy 
the islands of the sea. 



19 

To the leadership which I claim as the function 
of the college graduate, the holding of public office 
is by no means essential. More and more, with the 
diffusion of education and with new communication 
b}^ steam and telegraph, increases the controlling- 
force of that public opinion of which act of Con- 
gress and even judicial decision are but the records. 
Every morning. New York, Boston, Maine, Oregon, 
San Francisco, Charleston read the same history on 
which, every evening, they exchange judgments. 
This mighty weather bureau of press and telegraph 
gathers up the signs and portents of the time, from 
which statute and veto can, with great certainty, be 
predicted. High public office may oftentimes, 
though not so often as is commonly supposed, be 
acquired and retained by unworthy men, and by un- 
worthy means ; bat a permanent leadership of pub- 
lic opinion — a life- seat in that exalted assembly 
which, without visible session, ever legislates, and 
without army or navy, marshal or posse, ever exe- 
cutes its decree — can only be maintained by that 
combination of sound judgment, unselfish integrity, 
and absolute sincerity and strength, which make 
up what we call character. 

Let no man think that I am advocating what is 
called by way of reproach, a principle of aristocracy. 
When I maintain that that man is fitted to be the 
leader of the people who seeks only and simply 
their good ; whose leadership is conferred by their 
free consent; whose only instrumentality to gain or 
to hold power is an appeal to their reason and con- 



20 

science ; who gains their ear by the passport of his 
own spotless Hfe ; and who is fitted for their service 
by the highest training of the intellectual and moral 
faculties which they have been able to contrive and 
to provide, I consider that I am paying to the peo- 
ple themselves the highest possible tribute of rever- 
ence and honor. I am but asserting in another 
form the doctrine of the great Italian philosopher, 
"■ that doctrine of liberty, consolatory and full of 
joy, — how much wiser and more constant are the 
people than the prince." 

The spirit of the scholar is a democratic spirit. 
The throne of our men of letters, of Bryant and 
Longfellow, and Whittier and Lowell, is in the pop- 
ular heart. The welcome given to Agassiz in Amer- 
ica was a popular welcome. The ranks of our 
graduates and professional men are supphed from 
the same sources which supply the other occupa- 
tions of the community. They come from the same 
household. Some accident determined the course 
of one toward the college, and another toward the 
shop, or farm, or factory. Your education, after all, 
is but an advantage in starting, which it will require 
constant exertion to maintain. The men who make 
up the bulk of the population of our northern 
states, who sit on juries, who hold town offices, who 
carry on farms, who perform skilled labor in shops, 
who practice the great variety of occupation by 
which men get a secure and comfortable livelihood, 
have, as a rule, by no means neglected their own 
early opportunity in the common school or failed to 



2 I 



profit by press and lecture-room in later life. They 
desire what is honest and wise. They understand 
their own interest and that of the state, and in 
spite of the rude and dangerous forces which are 
at work in our society, will maintain our national 
life in freedom and in honor. Whoso seeks to 
persuade them to follow his lead addresses a tribu- 
nal well qualified to sit in judgment on his claim, 
and well knowing how to supply themselves with 
leadership, if he should prove unfit. 

Let me occupy a few moments in pointing out 
some of the conditions on which this leadership 
can be exercised. We have the right to expect that 
the man whom the public have given the training 
of the scholar, shall bring to the formation of opin- 
ions on questions which concern the public, a schol- 
ar's thoroughness of investigation. In urging the 
need of the scholar in politics, we do not mean that 
a man should leave the study of Latin and Greek, in 
which he is a scholar, to express his opinions on 
politics, in which he is no scholar. We have a right 
to expect of him that he will not express crude 
and shallow judgments as to contemporary men and 
events, of which he would be ashamed if they relat- 
ed to events of two thousand years ago. He must 
strive especially to study and understand the char- 
acter of the people to which he belongs. John 
Hancock declared, at the inauguration of President 
Willard of Harvard, that that college " was, in some 
sense, the parent and nurse of the late happy revo- 
lution in this commonwealth." If this were true in 



22 



any sense, it was because her graduates of that da)^ 
were profound students of this science. John Ad- 
ams said of his illustrious kinsman, the greatest 
popular leader that ever lived in New England, 
" He has the most thorough understanding of the 
principles of liberty and her resources in the temper 
and character of the people." 

He must avoid an ignorant and unreasoning fastid- 
iousness in his judgment of other men with whom 
he is called to act. Let him set up for himself the 
highest possible standard of duty and conduct. 
Let him insist that no unrighteousness or injustice 
stain any action for which his country or his party 
or himself is responsible. But let him remember in 
judging of the character and motives of his associ- 
ates, that the republic in which a majority must 
govern, is not likely soon to be governed by a ma- 
jority of men without faults. There are few say- 
ings or doings recorded of George III. which de- 
serve honorable remembrance. But his saying to 
Lord Sidmouth, " Give me the man who judges one 
human being with severity and every other with in- 
dulgence," deserves to be written in letters of gold. 
In saying this I am not uttering an empty moral 
commonplace. I am warning you against a rock 
on which the public usefulness of many an accom- 
plished citizen has been wrecked. In looking back 
over the political history of this commonwealth 
since I came to manhood, I recall a goodly number 
of men, some who are dead, some who are living, 
eloquent orators, learned lawyers, fitted by character 



and by opinion to be leaders of the people, whose 
names will be absent from the honorable roll of those 
who fought in the great civil battle for the freedom 
of a race. They could not stand by the side of 
Garrison because of his bitter invectives, or of 
Wilson because of his political management, or of 
Sumner because of some fault of taste or temper, 
and so they gathered up the skirts of their gar- 
ments about them, and the people watched and 
waited for their counsel in vain. Mr. Choate wrote 
in 1855 to his friend at Caraccas : — " Your estate is 
gracious that keeps you out of our politics. Any- 
thing more low, obscene, feculent, the manifold 
oceanic heavings of history have not cast up. We 
shall come to the worship of onions, cats, and things 
vermiculate." And this within six years of the he- 
roic days of 1 86 1. 

I spoke in the outset of the education at college 
as an education not merely of the intellect, but of 
the moral and religious nature. The leadership to 
which you must aspire is one to which such an ed- 
ucation calls and fits you. The destiny of these 
plastic political societies is to be determined, not 
' by their laws, but by the sentiments, principles, and 
opinions of the men of whom they consist. Every 
nation has behind its constitution, behind its form 
of government, some sentiment or opinion upon 
which it rests. Sir Andrew Mitchell, the famous 
English diplomatist, relates that Frederic the Great, 
at a review of sixty thousand men in Pomerania, 
asked the old Prince D'Anhalt, what in the scene 



24 

before them he admired the most. " Sire," he re- 
pHed, " I admire the fine appearance of the men." 
Frederick repHed, " what most excites my astonish- 
ment is, that you and I, my dear cousin, should be 
in the midst of such an army as this in perfect safe- 
ty. Here are sixty thousand men, who are all irre- 
concilable enemies to both you and myself ; not 
one among them that is not a man of more strength 
and better armed than either of us, yet they all 
tremble at our presence." Behind the whole strength 
of the monarchy, behind the supporting aristocracy, 
and the bulwark of army and nobility, was a power 
mighty enough to snap all these like straws, but 
kept in check by the vague but all pervading sense 
of the divine right of the king. The little semi- 
madman, semi-prophet, kept Europe in a fever of 
fear and rao^e, made half the families in his dominion 
desolate and poor, compelled every young man in 
Prussia to sacrifice to the king's ambition, the love 
of life, of comfort, and of home, and died at last 
seventy-five years old, in his bed. The French peo- 
ple endured for centuries even worse burdens. It 
was not till the educated men of France had eradi- 
cated from the popular mind with their religious 
belief the worship of the divinity that doth hedge 
a king, that the French revolution became possible. 
It is the peculiarity of this country, that the princi- 
ples or sentiments upon which it rests, have been 
asserted in the most solemn and authoritative form 
in the act which gave it life. 

The Declaration of Independence declared our 
national unity. It was one nation and not thirteen, 



25 

— " one people to whom it became necessary to dis- 
solve the political bonds which had connected them 
with another, and to assume their separate and equal 
station among the powers of the earth." It was as 
representatives of the United States of America, 
that the Congress declared the separation from 
Ensfland. — /No American state except Texas ever 
had'^a^'national life. It was as United States that 
they were declared free and independent by an in- 
strument, in which no one of the individual states is 
even named. The same instrument which declared 
the national existence and unity of this people, as- 
serted as a limitation upon the powers of sover- 
,eignty, that government has no authority to do 
anything against right. The British argument was 
stated by Dr. Johnson, its ablest advocate, in his 
celebrated tract " Taxation, no Tyranny." He 
says : — 

" All government is ultimately and essentially absolute, but subor- 
dinate societies may have more immunities, or individuals greater lib- 
erty, as the operations of government are differently conducted. An 
English individual, may by the supreme authority be deprived of 
liberty, for reasons of which that authority is the only judge. In 
sovereignty there are no gradations. There may be limited royalty, 
there may be limited consulships, but there can be no limited gov- 
ernment. There must in every society be some power or other 
from which there is no appeal, which admits no restrictions, which 
pervades the whole mass of the community, regulates and adjusts all 
subordination, enacts laws or repeals them, erects or annuls judica- 
tures, extends or contracts privileges, exempt itself from question or 
control, and bounded only by physical necessity." 

This pamphlet of Dr. Johnson, published in 1775, 
is entitled " An Answer to the Resolution and Ad- 



26 

dress of the American Congress." With this doc- 
trine of the British government, the American 
Congress joined issue by the declaration that the 
powers which governments derive from the consent 
of the governed are just powers; and by the claim 
of their newly constituted governments to do only 
those " acts and things which independent states 
may of right do." They further declare that it is 
the right of the people, in instituting a new govern- 
ment, not only to "organize its powers in such 
form," but " to lay its foundation in such principles 
as to them shall seem most likely to effect their 
safet)^ and happiness." The declaration is prefaced 
by a summary of these principles, not as in the 
English charters and bill of rights, grants from the 
government to the people, but as lying at the foun- 
dation of governments, and as of higher and prior 
authority to government itself. In the constitutions 
framed for the states in which that largest and most 
im.portant portion of sovereignty required for local 
self-government is deposited, the same doctrine with 
greater particularity and fullness of detail is assert- 
ed. The constitution of Virginia adopted one day 
before the Declaration of Independence was report- 
ed, is preceded by what is entitled in the instrument, 
" A declaration of rights made by the representa- 
tives of the good people of Virginia ; which rights 
do pertain to them and their posterity as the basis 
and foundation of governfyieni!' In that declara- 
tion the people of Virginia say,- " that no free gov- 
ernment, or the blessings of liberty can be preserv- 



27 

ed to any people, but by frequent recurrence to fun- 
dimental principles." This sentiment was copied 
by John Adams into the constitution of Massachu- 
setts of 1 780. 

I have not time and it would be foreign to the 
purpose of this discourse to enter upon a vindica- 
tion of the logical correctness of the proposition 
laid down in the opening of the Declaration of In- 
dependence, and in the bills of rights embraced in 
our early constitutions. The criticism was made by 
Mazzini, and I think repeated by Bismark, that they 
were assertions of rights and not of duties. But 
these critics consider the form rather than the sub- 
stance. Though in form a statement of rights, the 
t Declaration of Independence has always been ap- 
pealed to as a statement of duties. The appeals 
which have been made to it in our political history, 
have been to remind the citizens of their duties to 
other men, and not what they should claim for 
themselves. These declarations were the expressions 
of the profoundest convictions of the most religious 
people on earth at the most religious period of 
their history. By them they meant to lay the foun- 
dations of their government in the moral law. They 
were no empty declamation. They rang them and 
sounded them, and tried them and tested them, and 
made them links in the great chain on which they 
hung their nation, like the chain fastened by Jove 
to the highest summit of Olympus by which heaven 
and earth mio-ht hang; secure. 

I have recited this history to remind you that as 
sons of a New England college, you are the lineal 



28 



successors of the men who wrought out this service 
to mankind. The great thinkers of the revolution- 
ary age, with few exceptions, were either college 
graduates, or received the instructions of the college 
at second-hand from clergymen at whose knees they 
were trained. John Adams writes to Samuel Ad- 
ams in 1790, " Your Boston town meetings and our 
Harvard college have set the universe in motion." 
I have already cited John Hancock to the same 
effect. Yale, and William and Mary, and Prince- 
ton, may justly make a like claim. The discussions 
of theology and of the principles of religious liber- 
ty and duty, fitted the people for the kindred discus- 
sion of political principles. Mr. Ticknor says that 
one of the most practically wise statesmen then alive, 
often told him that we never should have had. our 
Revolution, if all the people had not been for a cen- 
tury in the habit of discussing the Westminster As- 
sembly's catechism. If the training of the college fit- 
ted your predecessors to be the leaders and guides of 
the people in founding their nation on fundamental 
principles of right and duty, surely the colleges of 
our day are degenerate if they do not fit their grad- 
uates to take a lead in that frequent recurrence to 
those principles which our fathers enjoin upon us 
as the indispensable condition on which the life of 
the nation can endure. Never more than to-day 
was this constant recurrence necessary. 

The habit is growing in many influential quarters 
of deriding what are called sentimental politics. 
The men who decry sentiment in politics, that is, 



29 

the application of the moral law to public conduct, 
are commonly quite as sentimental as anybody. It 
is only a question of the kind of sentiment to which 
they think proper to appeal. The men who sneer 
at the sentiment of justice, with its simple corollary 
o.^ equal right, at the sentiments of honor, good faith, 
disinterestedness, as practical forces in the conduct 
of government, are quite ready to make and to re- 
spond to appeals to the sentiments of hatred, of re- 
venge, of envy, of covetousness, or of personal 
ambition. 

The difficult problems in our national politics at 
this hour, will nearly all of them be solved if the 
people will adhere to rules of conduct imposed as 
restraints in the early constitutions. The sublimity 
of the principle of self-government does not consist 
wholly or chiefly in the idea that self is the person 
who governs, but quite as much in the doctrine that 
self is the person who is governed. How our race 
troubles would disappear if the dominant Saxon 
would but obey, in his treatment of the weaker 
races, the authority of the fundamental laws on 
which his own institutions rest ! The problem of 
to-day is not how to convert the heathen from hea- 
thenism, it is how to convert the Christian from 
heathenism ; not to teach the physician to heal the 
patient, but to heal himself. The Indian problem 
is not chiefly how to teach the Indian to be less 
savage in his treatment of the Saxon, but the Sax- 
on to be less savage in his treatment of the Indian. 
The Chinese problem is not how to keep Chinese 



30 

laborers out of California, but how to keep Chinese 
policies out of Congress. The negro question will 
be settled when the education of the white man is 
complete. 

The Declaration of Independence, beginning with 
its assertion of the natural freedom and equalit}- 
which pertain to all men as a birth-right, and its de- 
nial of the title of any government to exist in con- 
flict with these rights, ends with the statement that 
the nation which it then called into life was to do, 
in its separate and equal station among the nations 
of the earth, only those things which such states 
may of right do. The Massachusetts bill of rights, 
beginning with the same assertion of freedom and 
equality, terminates its comprehensive summary of 
the maxims of administration essential to the pres- 
ervation of popular liberty by setting forth " the 
end that it mav be a orovernment of laws and not 
of men." 

Upon these principles as corner-stones our fathers 
builded their state. What function more exalted 
for the educated men of the country than to keep 
alive in the hearts of the people reverence for these 
great and simple principles of liberty and duty — to 
defend them with all the powers of reason and ar- 
gument, to adorn them with all the resources of 
eloquence and scholarship, to make the people fa- 
miliar with their history, and with the miracles of 
peace, of prosperity, of comfort, and happiness they 
have already wrought for mankihd. 

The noblest and most fortunate nations, the no- 
noblest and happiest men, are those of simple be- 



31 

liefs. Wordsworth, the profoundest of English 
political philosophers, as he is, since Milton, the 
wisest and greatest of English poets, tells us, speak- 
ing of the Swiss republic : — 

" A few strong instincts and a few plain rules. 
Among the herdsmen of the Alps, have wrought 
More for mankind in many a trying hour. 
Than all the pride of intellect and thought." 

These few strong instincts and these few plain 
rules — virtus a c fides Hclvetioriim — have kept Switz- 
erland safe for five hundred years in her mountain 
fastnesses. The few plain rules our fathers framed 
will be enough for us. Let not their authority be 
undermined by the indifference or the evil example 
of our educated men. If they think, like Cicero's 
patrician, that whatever happen to the republic, 
their fish-ponds will be safe ; or fancy that in defi- 
ance of the prohibition of the sixth article of the 
bill of rights, they can obtain advantages or partic- 
ular and exclusive privileges distinct from those of 
the community, or contrive unlawful paths to wealth 
without adherence to those principles of justice, 
moderation, industry, and frugality which the eight- 
eenth article enjoins, they will discover their mis- 
take and meet their terrible retribution when the 
workingman strives to relieve the hardship of his 
lot by imitating their example. Kearney's constitu- 
tion never could have found favor with the farmers 
of California, to whom its adoption was due, but for 
the previous management of railroad and banking- 
corporations, for which educated New England cap- 
italists are not without large responsibility. 



This is the empire to which you are invited. 
This is the leadership to which you may aspire. To 
this the teachings of this place fit and summon you. 
To this the honorable example of your predecessors 
incites you. Non potest stare rcspudlicafreta vetera- 
nis, sine magno subsidio jiwentutis. No greater op- 
portunity surely was ever vouchsafed to man. It is 
a task which may well stimulate you by its difficul- 
ties and invite you by its rewards. The last thirty 
years have brought new elements into our body pol- 
itic. Our fathers builded their state with that Eng- 
lish race whom the wisdom of a thousand years had 
ripened. It is for your generation to make the re- 
straints of constitutional liberty acceptible to races 
to whom law has for ages appeared only as tyranny, 
and liberty been known only in her excesses. Your 
fathers dealt with men made docile to the teachings 
of political duty by their simple religious creed. 
You have to deal with a generation whose audacious 
skepticism questions the foundations of all faith, 
and whose positive philosophy declares the belief in 
God himself '' a dissolving dream of the past." But 
the few strong instincts to which you need to appeal 
are planted in the heart of universal humanity, and 
the few plain rules you need to apply are enough 
for every exigency of the state. 

Devoted to this patriotic service, you will recon- 
cile and blend the Grecian idea of the state as a 
being compared with which all individual existence 
is valueless and subordinate, and the Christian idea 
of the state as but an instrument for the welfare of 



33 

an immortal and spiritual life. One of the greatest, 
perhaps the greatest, of the living scientific men of 
England, in his address at Belfast, as he ended his 
masterly survey of the domain of science, sought 
to inspire his auditors by affirming that the topics 
which he had scarcely touched would be handled by 
the loftiest intellects when speaker and auditors, 
" like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted 
away into the infinite azure of the past" Rather 
let me speak in the spirit of the teachings of this 
place. Your lives, so devoted to patriotism and 
duty, will bear fruit in that mighty national existence, 
compared with which the longest human life is but 
as the pulsation of an artery. More than this : they 
will return to you their satisfactions and rewards 
even when that national existence is over, if the 
power which dismisses a star on its pathway through 
the skies, promising that in a thousand years it shall 
return again, true to its hour, and keeps his word, 
keepeth the promise he hath made to the conscious 
soul of man, 

" and that, which lived 
True life, live on." 



LBAgt}6 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ( 




